


Can You Credit It?

by Missy



Category: Crimson Petal and the White - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Healing, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, Religious Content, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 20:07:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5883877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sugar and Sophie settle into their new lives, but eventually Sugar needs help running their small household. </p><p>Then fate lends its own charm to the proceedings...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can You Credit It?

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Small Fandom Fest '18: Prompt: The Crimson Petal and The White (Movie), Sugar/ or & Agnes, Sophie has two mommies. (Post-show)

It’s simple in the beginning. She finds a small room in an out of the way seaside town, not ten miles away from where their ship first docks in New York. Sugar has engaged Sophie in a game of identity and chance as they travel across the ocean, and by now the girl has perfected it. She must answer to the name of Lorna Crenshaw, Sugar drills it into her mind; Sugar, much alike, must calm herself and answer to the name of Missus Abigail Crenshaw, Lorna’s mother, widow of a middle-class sailor whose boat went down in a storm. She has credentials enough to lie; to seek social openings and worm her way into the town’s doings. Easily enough she finds space – at the town’s small church, which needs a choirmistress and fair organizer; at a clean and respectable boardinghouse until she can find work enough to live on. Sugar knows how to play this games – never welshing on her creditors, always careful to repay her debts, taking part in the town’s activities, and making it known that it was absolutely necessary for her to gain employ to keep the child in bread and stockings.

Sugar ends up working as a first grade teacher in a small girl’s boarding school at the town’s far end, a squat saltbox of a building with several homes for the teaching staff on its massive campus. The little misses wear white dresses and patent shoes and absorb Sophie’s simple lessons in mathematics and letters, leading them on tiny adventures and keeping herself at the very heart of the merriment. She is very popular. Sugar thinks to herself archly that she will likely always be so in some respect.

How she has trained her silver tongue to waggle! She can lie as well as anyone now, can make absolutely anything completely convincing and sane-seeming. This is how she gains possession of one of those staff homes only six months into her stay; a sweet little cottage close to the beach, with a thatched roof and a surprisingly cozy interior. There is soon a room for Sophie, bumblebee colored walls and a few dolls and marbles and jacks, warm thick quilts instead of suffocating, dusty antiquity. There is room for light and air and education and love and afternoons running free in the sun. And how easily Sophie takes to this new world, running free of heavy costume, uttering wild cries as she tries to catch up with her new peers, wearing neat white gloves and torn hose, rolling hoops up and down the beach.

Most nights Sugar spends lying in her feather tick, beside Sophie on the small feather tick she’d purchased for their even smaller house. After the smoke, danger and crush of the city Sugar is relieved to have some sort of succor in the clean quiet of a small city, even though it meant a form of isolation. The small manor house is cozy enough, and soon they start to win the battle of self-sufficiency through stubborn determination. 

Sophie is enrolled in school under her new name, and soon she thrives, running and laughing alongside the other children happily. Sugar nurses her new dreams, her new faith, writing pages of good strong words about the worthiness of women, about the spirits an strengths of the young women she teaches, and of Sophie, rising daily from the ashes of her own fear. Sugar is careful to keep busy and the house clean on the weekends; to look respectable enough, to live a life thoroughly wholesome to the naked eye, so none will stare closer.

Eventually there is enough money to hire a tiring woman to wash and mend and feed Sophie’s pony and Sugar’s flock of sheep and chickens and goats, care for the interior of the house while Sugar teaches those upper-crest boarding school maidens and Sophie learns of astronomy, greek mythology and music. 

The first applicant is too old, the second too bitterly bent on her sense of discipline being the only correct method of teaching the child. 

The third makes Sugar’s heart leap, beating and bright red, into her throat.

She introduces herself as a matron of the convent of the Sacred Heart – out on a mission to America, to mingle among the people and minister to their needs. Her hands are mild and soft and pale as they take Sugar’s between her palms. She will cook and clean and drudge and keep the house in order as a gesture of servitude. And instruct Sophie in religious matters on Sunday, if Sugar so desires. So she did find her place, did find her Convent of Health after all.

“I love children,” she says, and Sugar almost laughs to remember the old Agnes who so feared her own flesh and blood.

In light of this, Sugar is flabbergasted. The sweet face, the open candybox that was Agnes Rackham, remained free of guile, framed by her starched and dyed habit. She nearly even seems free of the wild hopeless fantasies that plagued her when she and Sugar were trapped in lockstep in William’s fancy pile of a house. But is she in service of their old master? Of God? 

The innocence in her expression tells Sugar all she needs to know.

 

*** 

 

Sophie does well enough under the religious instruction - and if she recognizes this person as her mother, she does not let on, masking along as well as though Sugar balances out these stories of gloom with birds and leaves and snowflakes, pictures of the natural world.

“I can’t pay anything,” Sugar says one afternoon, a week into the woman's stay. “It'll be a share of food and board but no more than that,” she says.

“It’s all right. It’ll be payment enough to do the Lord’s work and mend ties with Sophie.” The pretenses dropped away instantly. She added quickly, “I so hoped to see you again Angel, though I did not think that I might.”

“Are you working for him?” Sugar asks. 

“Who? William? I don’t know where he is. This is a paradise of the Lord’s making,” says Agnes quite firmly. “Why would I seek to disrupt what He has made holy and right?” she wonders.

Quietly, Agnes bustles about the kitchen, preparing Sophie’s late breakfast. Sugar watches er warily, directing sparingly.

 _Two mothers,_ she thinks to herself. Sugar would not have credited the universe with such a strange surprising twist, but it seems the world has much to teach her. 

She and Agnes smile nervously at each other as water leaps in the kettle between them. Yes. Much.


End file.
